Jesse Bering, author of Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us, says we should
break taboos around zoophilia, incest and child porn. But where do we draw
the line, asks Theo Merz

The point – or rather thrust – of Jesse Bering’s new book, Perv, is that we are all sexual deviants in our own way. “I’d be willing to bet that [there is] buried somewhere an undeniable fact of your sex life that would hobble you instantaneously with shame should the wrong individual suddenly find out about it,” the New York-based evolutionary psychologist writes.

To set us at ease, he shares one such undeniable fact of his own sex life. Namely, that as a teenager he used to masturbate over an image of a Neanderthal man from one of his father’s old anthropology textbooks. “The Neanderthal was shown crouching down, pink gonads dangling teasingly between muscular apish thighs,” he informs us, “while with all his cognitive might this handsome, grunting beast tried desperately to light a fire…One must work with the material one has.”

In the book that follows he argues that rather than label unusual sexual behaviours as perversions, we should be willing to talk about them openly – so we are better able to help those whose ‘kinks’ would otherwise inflict harm on others. He wants our discussion around sexual deviance to shift away from what is normal or natural to what is harmful. Essentially, as long as it’s not inflicting damage on others it shouldn’t be taboo.

Which sounds reasonable enough in theory but turns out to be something I – and he, it turns out when we speak on the phone – have some difficulty getting on board with in practice. After Bering’s initial self-examination he moves onto looking at some of the least socially acceptable ‘perversions’. Here, he argues that bestiality should be no more taboo than eating meat, and if anything less so (“if I were a bovine, I’d rather be ‘humanely’ penetrated by the penile equivalent of a stiff strand of hay than be ‘humanely’ slaughtered by seventeen-inch steel blades”).

Then he brings up the case of Elijah and Milo Peters, identical twins from the Czech Republic who have sex with each other in gay porn films and say they are in a monogamous relationship off-set. The sex is consensual, there’s no possibility of genetic deficiencies in any offspring and the brothers are happy together. All this considered, “their steamy incestuous pairing isn’t so obviously wrong,” the 38-year-old author claims.

While many people will be sympathetic to Bering’s argument that we need to focus on what’s harmful rather than what’s unnatural in sexual deviance, seeing it taken to its logical conclusion in this way is uncomfortable to say the least. “The fact that it makes us uncomfortable doesn’t make it morally wrong,” Bering insists when I bring this up with him. “I think we need to be aware of why we think this way. We can’t just stop at the fact that it makes us queasy – that’s not enough for a reasonable, rational person in the 21st century.”

So he’s all right with the idea of gay incest and having sex with cows? “I absolutely still feel queasy about this. It was not an easy book to write but I wanted to be intellectually consistent.”

Where it became even harder to write, he says, was a section about child pornography. Here he suggests child pornography, rather than encourage paedophiles to act on their sexual attraction to children, provides them with “sexual catharsis” (citing research from Japan and Denmark which found the legal availability of child porn is associated with reduced overall rates of child molestation). Computer-generated child porn could therefore make sense “when considered within the moral framework of harmfulness that we’ve been using throughout this book,” though he admits this “may make us personally squirm”.

Bering, whose previous book was called Why is the Penis Shaped Liked That, is aware Perv is likely to cause controversy. There will be plenty of conservatives, he says, who think people like him are “opening the door to all sorts of wickedness and deviance.” But people have to start talking about what really turns them on – otherwise “how will we ever know how many of us fit into these ‘inappropriate’ categories? How will we make moral progress?”

The last page of the book encourages us to open up about our own kinks so we can “walk this brave new path completely naked from here to eternity, removing this weighty plumage of sexual normalcy and strutting, proudly, our more deviant sexual selves. You go first.” I’m afraid I have a very strict word limit on this one, but do feel free to share in the comment section below.